Re: Computing Randomness

From: <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 09:29:36 +0200

Hal, you wrote:

> I believe that attempting an extensive detailed formal description of
> the Everything is the wrong approach. IMO - at least in this case - the
> more information used to describe, the smaller the thing described.

I was not able to follow this, but informal and vague descriptions of
everything have been around for millennia. Now it is time to go beyond
this. One cannot scientifically discuss nonformal statements or theories.

You did refer to formal describability when you repeatedly wrote that
if a universe is a theorem cascade in an N-bit formal axiomatic system
"then Chaitin's incompleteness dictates that the cascade must stop,"
and there are no more than 2^[N + c] theorems. For some reason this
statement even made it into your "FAQ" list.

Counter example: number theory is describable by finitely many bits of
axioms yielding an infinite cascade of provable theorems.

JS
Received on Tue Apr 10 2001 - 00:31:44 PDT